The Cruel Sea

by Nicholas Monsarrat

Ericson had just passed the first sweet margin of sleep when the alarm bells clanged: for a moment he could not really believe that they were ringing, and then, as he felt the loathed sound drilling deep into his brain, he had such a violent upsurge of rage and disappointment that he came near to childish tears. It was too much altogether, it wasn’t fair . . . He heaved himself out of his bunk, and followed the many other running feet up the ladder again, conscious only of an enormous weariness, and a brain suddenly and brutally robbed of the sleep it craved. How could a man, or a ship, cope with this? How could they be expected to fight anything except the weather?

  It seemed that they would have to: it seemed that, as soon as the weather gave a foot of ground, the other enemy, ready in the wings, stepped in with fresh violence, fresh treachery. The scene that greeted Ericson had a pattern made familiar by a hundred convoys: it showed the ships in station, the dusk gathering round them, the heaving sea, and then the ugly deformity which meant disaster – the single winged ship sagging away out of line, already listing mortally, already doomed. She was a small ship: she must, as a prelude to her defeat, have had a special form of hell during the last week of storm . . . Ericson looked at Allingham.

  ‘What happened, Guns?’

  ‘She just went, sir.’ The Australian accent, as usual in moments of excitement, was thick and somehow reassuring. ‘Fired a distress rocket, about a minute ago. But how the hell could they hit her, in this sort of weather?’

  ‘M’m.’ Ericson grunted. The astonishing question had already occurred to him, but it was useless to speculate. Probably there was yet another new weapon: probably U-boats could now fire a torpedo vertically from the bed of the ocean, and hit a ship plumb in its guts. One could think of a nice expressive name for it. But it was no use being surprised at anything in this bloody, this immensely long war . . . ‘Who’s the wing escort?’

  ‘Pergola, sir. She’s making a sweep to starboard.’

  Ericson grunted again. That was all that could be done, at the moment: Pergola could sweep the suspect area, the stern escort could pick up the bits. Saltash could plod along at the head of the convoy, he himself could think it all out, with cutting logic, using an ice-cold brain . . . He saw Allingham looking at him with a rough sort of compassion in his glance, taking in his inflamed eyes, half-sunk in sleep, his swollen face, the twitching of his cheekbone – all the marks of exhaustion which Ericson was aware of himself and which could not be disguised. He smiled ruefully.

  ‘I’d just got my head down.’

  ‘Bad luck, sir.’ Allingham paused. ‘Shall I go along to the fo’c’sle, sir? Or stay up here?’

  Ericson smiled again, acknowledging the line of thought. ‘You go down, Guns. I’ve got the ship.’

  When he had gone, there was silence among the men now gathered at Action Stations on the bridge. Ericson watched the convoy, Lockhart watched the sinking ship. Holt and the signalmen watched Pergola, the lookouts watched their appointed arcs, the bridge messenger watched Ericson. It was a closed circle, of men in danger doing nothing at a moment when active movement would have been a relief, carried in a ship which might herself be doing the wrong thing for want of a single clue. When Ericson said, suddenly and aloud: ‘We’ll wait’, it was as much to bridge the dubious pause in his own mind as to inform the men round him.

  But the pause was not long. There was an exclamation from Holt, the midshipman, and then he said excitedly: ‘Pergola’s got a signal hoisted!’ He stared through his glasses at the corvette, rooting away to starboard like a questing terrier. ‘Large flag, sir.’

  The yeoman of signals called out: ‘Pergola in contact, sir.’

  I wonder, thought Ericson; but he did not say it aloud. Pergola, young and enthusiastic, was always ready to depth-charge anything, from a clump of seaweed to a shoal of sardines, but he did not want to discourage her. Depth-charges were cheap, ships and men were not . . . Now all of them, save the stolid lookouts dedicated to their arc of vision, turned to watch Pergola. Three miles to starboard, she was steering obliquely away from the convoy: she was rolling and pitching drunkenly, and her increased speed sent the spray in great clouds over her bridge. Steaming full ahead, thought Ericson appraisingly: she must be going to drop some for luck. And as he thought it, and wished that Saltash might have an excuse for doing the same, another flag fluttered up to Pergola’s crosstrees, and the yeoman of signals called out: ‘Pergola attacking, sir.’

  Now they all watched with fresh attention, wondering how good the asdic contact was, knowing with professional insight just how difficult it must be for Pergola to get her depth-charges cleared away and ready for dropping, while steaming full ahead in this immensely troubled sea. Compass Rose used to do this sort of thing, thought Lockhart, as Pergola gave an especially vicious lurch and shipped a green sea on her quarter: Compass Rose used to sweep into action balanced inelegantly on one ear and one leg, while poor old Ferraby danced a jig round the depth-charge rails as he tried to get his charges ready, with a bunch of ham-handed stokers to help him, and plenty of caustic comment from the bridge. It was nice to have graduated from corvettes . . . Lockhart watched Pergola reminiscently: Holt and the signalmen watched her with a professional eye to her signals: below on the plotting table, Raikes the navigator watched her with the searching beam of the radar set; and Ericson watched her with a proprietary interest. For him, she was simply an extension of his own armament, a probing steel finger sent out from Saltash to find and hit the enemy. The torpedoed ship had been his, and Pergola was his too: if the one balanced the account of the other, it would not be so bad, it would justify the escort screen, it would appease the sense of failure that nagged his tired brain, it would let him sleep once more.

  Pergola went in like an express train somehow diverted on to a switchback railway. They saw her charges go down, they saw her sweep round to port as soon as they were dropped: then, after a few moments, the huge columns of grey-green water were tossed into the air by the explosion. When the spray settled, they waited again, their glasses trained on the place of execution; but the surface of the sea was innocent, the expected black shape did not appear. Pergola, now at half-speed, headed back towards the explosion area, uncertainly, like a small boy who has made far too much noise in his mother’s drawing room and wishes he were safely and anonymously back in the nursery. There was a pause, and then a third flag went up from her bridge.

  ‘From Pergola, sir,’ said the yeoman of signals promptly. ‘”Lost contact”.’

  ‘Call her up,’ said Ericson. ‘Make: “Continue to search your area. Report nature of original contact”.’

  The lamps flickered between the two ships.

  ‘Contact was firm, moving left, classified as U-boat,’ came Pergola’s answer.

  ‘What is your estimate now?’ was Ericson’s next signal.

  ‘I still think it was a U-boat,’ said Pergola manfully. Then she added, as if with an ingenuous smile: ‘It was where a U-boat ought to have been.’

  Now, there, thought Ericson, there I agree with you. The attack had certainly come from that side, the U-boat would naturally have tried to move away to starboard, she would have been steering the course that Pergola indicated; she might well have been just about where Pergola had dropped her depth-charges. That being so, it was worth while Pergola staying where she was, and continuing the hunt: in fact, he thought with sudden vehemence, it was worth while staying there himself, and organising the hunt on a two-ship basis. He would be taking a chance if he detached two escorts from the screen; but it was very unlikely that the U-boat was one of a pack: in this weather, the convoy could only have been sighted by chance, from close to, and there would have been no time to assemble other craft for a concentrated attack. She was therefore a lone wolf, sinking her fangs once, swiftly, and then slinking off into the forest again. Lone wolves of this sort deserved special attention, special treatment. The chance was worth taking.

  The pattern of action emerged new-minted from his brain, as
if, however tired he were, he had only to press a button marked ‘Detach two escorts for independent search’ in order to produce a typed schedule of operational orders. The necessary directions were dictated in a smooth series which kept all three signalmen busy at the same time. Signals went to the Admiralty and the commodore of the convoy, to tell them what was happening: to Harmer, to take over as Senior Officer: to Pergola, to continue her search until Saltash joined her: to Rose Arbour, to take Pergola’s place on the screen: to Streamer, to despatch the sinking merchantman by gunfire, and then rejoin: and to the other escorts, to station themselves according to the new diagram. Then Ericson summoned Lockhart and Johnson, the engineer officer, to the bridge, to explain what he proposed to do: he conferred, lengthily and technically, with Raikes at the plotting table; and then he took Saltash round in a wide sweep to starboard, and, coming up on Pergola’s quarter, started sending a final long signal beginning: ‘We will organise our search in accordance with two alternative possibilities.’

  Lockhart had never admired the Captain more than during the twelve hours that followed. In the end, he thought, for all these new machines and scientific stuff, war depends on men . . . He knew that Ericson must have been desperately tired, even before the new crisis arrived: if the exacting trip northbound to Murmansk, and the last five days of battering weather, did not suggest it, then his grey lined face and humped shoulders supplied a reliable clue. And yet there was in all his actions, both now, and during the subsequent long, intricate, and determined hunt for the submarine, no trace of tiredness or of readiness to compromise: he rose to the moment, and kept at the required pitch of alertness, as if he had come to the task fresh from a six weeks’ holiday; and the result, in addition to being a remarkable physical effort, was, in the realm of submarine detection, a tactical masterpiece as well.

  Ericson must have been very sure, thought Lockhart, that the submarine was there, and that Pergola – the happy-go-lucky Pergola – had for once been on the right track and might well have damaged her: he must have conquered his tiredness with this knowledge that the quarry was immediately to hand. For it was not enough to keep in mind that a ship had been sunk, and men killed in the process: that was a commonplace of the Atlantic, and the revengeful energy it bred soon petered out. It was the professional sense which was now the mainspring of every sustained effort of will: the feeling, present all the time, that senior officers of escorts were specifically hired to sink U-boats, and that for this reason U-boats must never be allowed to go to waste.

  Certainly, Ericson clung on to his quarry, or the hope of it, as if he would have been personally ashamed to forfeit the chance of a kill . . . It was six o’clock in the evening when Saltash and Pergola separated, to start their different schemes of search: it was midnight before any results rewarded either of them. Earlier, down in Saltash’s plotting room, Ericson and Raikes had made a detailed appreciation of the prospects, involving three different suppositions. Firstly, the U-boat might have been slightly damaged by Pergola’s attack, in which case she would dive deep and stay there, in the hope of fooling the pursuit and patching herself up in the meantime. Alternatively, she might have been badly damaged, and would need to start creeping for the shelter of the nearest home port as soon as she could. Lastly, she might have escaped damage altogether – or have been outside the area of attack in the first place: she would then probably decide, after the initial scare, to follow the convoy at a distance and come in for a second helping later that night. There were variations latent in all these possibilities; but thus the broad outlines had confronted Ericson as he started his reasoned, highly technical guesswork on the plotting table.

  The last possibility – that the U-boat would continue to follow the convoy – was something which Saltash must now disregard: if the U-boat were going to try again, Harmer and the rest of the escort screen must cope with it themselves. That left the other two alternatives: the lurking in the deep, or the immediate creep for home. Lurking meant, for the hunting escort, a long and patient period of waiting up above: it might involve circling the area slowly for as long as twenty-four hours, all the time on the alert for any sign of a breakout. If, on the other hand, the U-boat had already started for home, the journey might be eastwards towards Norway, or south-east to the German coast, or due south to one of the Biscay ports: it meant in any case a rapidly extending range of search, becoming more like a needle-in-the-haystack proposition with every hour that passed.

  Of the two, Ericson finally chose for himself the patient, stalking wait, above the spot where the U-boat ought to be: it was the one he thought most likely, and Saltash’s superior asdic and radar would give her a decided advantage if the U-boat tried to run for it. The other – the cast for home, in an ever-widening arc – was a somewhat forlorn venture: in assigning it to Pergola, he tried not to feel that he was giving the junior ship a dubious chance of distinguishing herself . . . Something of the sort must have occurred to the irrepressible Pergola, who, on taking her leave, signalled: ‘Don’t forget it was originally my bird.’

  Ericson, hovering between the alternative answers: ‘We’ll go fifty-fifty on the medals’, and ‘Confine your signals to essential traffic’, finally sent none at all. All that he really wanted to say to Pergola, as she drew away and the darkness thickened between them, was that she carried his blessing with her. But there was really no official version of this.

  The next six hours had not the smallest excitement for anyone aboard Saltash: they had, in fact, a deadly sameness, an unrewarding monotony, the hardest thing of all for tired men to support. Ericson remained on the bridge the whole time, hunched in his chair, wide awake, while Saltash quartered the suspect area at half-speed; for hour after hour her asdic recorded nothing at all, and her radar simply the diminishing speck of light which was Pergola sweeping deeper and deeper to the south-east. Ericson ate a scratch meal at eight o’clock: relays of cocoa reached him at hourly intervals: the moon came up, and then left them again: the sea flattened as the wind died. It was cold: the cold attacked not only the body, it chilled the mind as well, so that to keep alert, to believe that what one was doing was right, became more and more difficult.

  At times Ericson’s thoughts wandered so far that the effort to bring them back was like a physical ordeal, a cruel tug on some stretched sinew of the brain. I am very tired, he thought: I have this pain of tiredness in my legs and across my shoulders and under my heart: that thing inside my head is starting to flutter again. This search may go on for hours, this search may go on for ever: we are probably doing the wrong thing, we have probably guessed wrong in every respect, from the very beginning: there were probably a pack of six or eight U-boats in this area all the time, and they are preparing to fall upon the convoy at this moment, while we fool about, fifty miles astern of it. I have weakened the escort screen at this crucial time, I have taken away two ships out of eight, I have been, by one quarter, unforgivably stupid and rash, I am ripe for a court martial . . . The asdic pinged away, like a nagging insect: the tick-tick of the motor on the plotting table reached Ericson continually up the voice-pipe, like some infernal metronome reminding him that everything he did was out of joint. The hours crept past, and the change of course which came every fifteen minutes seemed a futile break in a pattern already futile.

  Now and again he spoke to Raikes, the navigator, who had the first watch; and Raikes answered him quietly, unhurriedly, without turning from his place at the front of the bridge. But these exchanges never contained what Ericson really wanted to say, and never what he wanted to hear, either: they simply featured a comment on the weather, a query about the distance run, a neutral remark on any neutral subject that occurred to him. For his own comfort, his own hunger, he wanted to say: do you think we are right, do you think we are wasting our time: is the U-boat here at all, or have I, in diluting the escort screen by a quarter, made what may turn out to be a murderous mistake? But none of these were captain’s questions, and so they remained unasked,
prisoners in the brain; while Saltash covered the same square of ocean once every hour, and Pergola gradually faded out of range, and the black and empty sea, deserted even by the moon, offered to Saltash only a cold derisive hissing as she passed.

  But the change of watch at midnight marked a change of fortune as well; Allingham and Vincent had hardly taken over from Raikes – indeed, Raikes was still writing up his meagre entry in the deck log – when the pattern of the night quickly flowered, in the only way that could bring any pleasure to the senses. The asdic repeater, which could be heard all over the bridge, and which had been sounding an identical, damnable note for six hours on end, suddenly produced an astonishing variation – a solid echo, an iron contact in a featureless ocean . . . Ericson jumped when he heard it, as did everyone else within earshot: the bridge sprang to life as if the darkness had become charged with an electric fervour that reached them all instantly.

  ‘Sir!’ began Allingham.

  ‘Bridge!’ called the asdic rating.

  ‘Captain, sir!’ said the yeoman of signals.

  ‘All right,’ said Ericson, slipping down off his chair. ‘I heard it . . . What a nice noise . . . Hold on to it . . . Sound Action Stations . . . Yeoman!’

  ‘Sir?’ said the yeoman of signals.

  ‘Make to Pergola: “Return to me with all dispatch”.’

  That’s a guess, he thought as he said it – but the echo, loud and clear, confirmed him in the belief that this, the blank stretch of ocean which had suddenly blossomed, was now the place for all available hunting escorts to be. Only U-boats sounded like that, only U-boats could produce that beautiful metallic ring; and this U-boat, which had struck once and then lain in hiding for so long, must now be finally cornered. It would take Pergola over two hours to get back from her search, even ‘with all dispatch’ – the Navy’s most urgent order; but she deserved to be in at the kill, and she could play a useful supporting role if the U-boat were elusive . . . The asdic echo sharpened: Lockhart, now stationed on the set, called out: ‘Target moving slowly right’: Vincent, from aft, reported his depth-charges ready: Saltash began to tremble as the revolutions mounted, and the range shortened down to striking distance.